3 Cite Discrimination in Suit Against Fujitsu : Layoffs: Two executives and a secretary claim they lost their jobs with the company because they aren’t Japanese. The trio seeks $70 million in damages.

Three former Fujitsu Systems of America employees have filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit against their former employer and its Japanese parent, alleging that they were discriminated against on the basis of race and national origin.

The suit seeks up to $70 million in compensatory and punitive damages and was filed in San Diego County Superior Court by Frank Ensign, 59, the company’s former chief financial officer; Terence Turnbull, 53, the former vice president of marketing, and Esther White 64, who was Ensign’s executive secretary.

All three of the plaintiffs are Caucasians who allege they lost their jobs for not being Japanese, their attorney Nicholas Boylan said Wednesday.

The trio were among 45 Fujitsu Systems employees who were laid off last April in what a company source described as a reorganization. The job cuts brought total Fujitsu Systems of America payroll down to 655 employees, 378 of whom work in San Diego.

A subsidiary of Japan-based computer giant Fujitsu Ltd., with worldwide sales of $18 billion, Fujitsu Systems of America makes point-of-sale terminals, hand-held accounting systems and automated bank teller machines.

Attorney Boylan said the three were in fact subsequently replaced by Japanese employees of Fujitsu and thus were the victims of “pernicious and malicious race, age and national origin discrimination against plaintiffs by Japanese-owned . . . companies and Japanese individuals.”

Saying the company had not yet had a chance to review the suit, a Fujitsu Systems of America official who asked not to be named said the suit was without merit.

Discrimination “would be hard for them to substantiate with the new reorganization and new job responsibilities,” the official said. “I don’t know how you compare one job with another.”

The plaintiffs allege in their suit that the reorganization was a “pretext” to achieve a goal of placing people of “Japanese race and/or national origin in key financial or management positions.”

Boylan said Ensign and Turnbull were both recruited by Fujitsu from other companies and that both were earning salaries in excess of $150,000 at the time of the layoffs.

Each had spent five years or more with the company, during which time none had ever been given negative performance reviews by their employer, he said.

None of the three has been able to find employment since the layoffs, Boylan said.

Ensign, who was hired away from Aerojet by Fujitsu, has had to sell his home in Rancho Santa Fe as a result of losing his job, he said.

The suit, which asks up to $20 million in compensatory damages and up to $50 million in punitive damages, also names Fujitsu America in San Jose and Fujitsu employees Takehiko Noda, Yusaku Onaga and Yasushi Nakamura as defendants.